How a dinosaur fossil in Hong Kong shows the big problem with auctioning skeletons
Hector the Deinonychus highlights how, like works of art, fossils too can be sold to the highest bidder. That has palaeontologists worried
Around 110 million years ago, a dinosaur went hunting. Stalking through ferns along a riverbank, it twitched its nose to the wind and caught scent of a plant-eater ahead. Its head darted upwards. Its eyes locked on the target.
The dinosaur drew its sickle claws upwards, ready to make a lethal strike. But something was not right. The ground was sinking. Its legs were trapped in sand and mud. Limbs flailing, the hunter slid deeper and vanished under the ooze.
It was not the last time this dinosaur disappeared.
Over aeons, its bones solidified and became fossils. Then, a little more than a decade ago, a pair of fossil hunters dug up a patch of land in the US state of Montana.
With brushes, hammers and chisels, the pair painstakingly unearthed 126 bones, revealing a fossilised Deinonychus, the fierce carnivore that inspired the terrifying velociraptors in the novel and movie Jurassic Park.
The fossil was of serious scientific importance. Endowed with celebrity, it had significant monetary value too. When the dinosaur, nicknamed “Hector”, was put up for auction in 2022 at Christie’s in New York, an anonymous buyer paid US$12.4 million – twice the auction house’s estimate.
